The Daily Struggle

I was walking up my street today, the sun is reflecting off the fresh snow, and observing the neighbourhood. I’ve done this same walk thousands of times, the vibe the same every time. There are layers and layers of memories in this community, from eating cherry ice cream in the motel we lived in when we first moved here when I was three, to watching the giant fish tank at the university in between classes. 

Maybe people who travel frequently or move all the time don’t understand this same concept of community. I sometimes get asked if I’m from “down south.” I’ve learned that means that people think I’m from Surrey because I’m brown and Surrey is full of Punjabis. There is a sigh of relief and dropping of the shoulders when I say “no, I grew up here.” They are relieved as if to say, “you get it, now I don’t have to explain what it’s like to live here.” That explanation would be difficult to offer. I do get it; I get the struggle of the fact that you can’t ride your bike because there aren’t proper bike lanes and people get hit by cars all the time. I get that it’s hard to walk in the winter because it’s -50 and you don’t want to fall on the ice, and there’s 6 feet of snow to shovel. I’m not exaggerating- there was so much snow once I climbed over top of my 6 foot fence and it was -50 just this winter. It’s suffocating from the wildfires or the pollution from the mills (we had some of the worst air quality in the entire world in August). Here I am asking you to exercise, when you have all these barriers. Public transport isn’t really a thing and the fear of hitting a moose on a head on collision while driving is real. I get that driving an electric car doesn’t make sense because where will you recharge when there are no stations and how will you make it over the snow? I get that the cost of vegetables and fruit is ridiculously high because in some cases, they travel from Mexico or California to get to us and I’m asking you to eat well when you can’t even afford it. I understand that the water in some places is so contaminated people don’t drink it. I had no water at my house for three days. I understand that highways can be entirely closed preventing travel, the electricity goes out and there’s many places with no cell service. I get that we live on the “Highway of Tears” and until recently were “Canada’s most dangerous city.” I too, cry over those missing and murdered women. That there’s no cultural stuff like gidda, gatka, Khalsa schools, and tanti saaj classes. Our schools don’t have fancy high tech equipment, they are crowded and under-resourced. I get that we are 800 km from comprehensive medical care and you might die waiting to get there when the weather is bad. Due to all of these community factors, we have poor healthcare statistics- this is what we call the social determinants of health. It is harder to be healthy in rural or remote environments because of the impact of things like food, education, housing, safety, stress, racism, etc. The reason I understand these issues is not only because I live here but I worked to help do city planning and create a vision for downtown. We are proud to be Canadian. We are proud to have the freedoms we do, but there is a healthcare disparity between the north and the rest of the province. 

I understand that the lived struggle of being here is why people don’t want an outsider from a place where they have all the resources and luxuries coming here and telling us what to do and how it is. I wonder if that is how it is for people in third world countries when outsiders came in and start changing things. What I’ve always known is that the aid that we provide places should always be grounded in local leadership and in the local people. It shouldn’t be about us trying to make ourselves feel better that we are doing something or building our own reputation and image up. That isn’t real aid. I wonder also our role as the Sikh diaspora in helping Punjab. We have a duty to our homeland. We have a responsibility to help our people, but we have to be careful not to do the same thing. We can’t assume that we know better than them, about their own lives. The Sikhs in Punjab are living the daily grind and struggle. The farmers are living with having their livelihoods taken from them, with debt, with friends who have killed themselves. We do not live that reality day in and day out, so we have to make sure we help from the right place of our hearts. People in daily poverty and struggle have a hard time lifting themselves out and it is important for us to speak, for us to help. We must use our resources and knowledge to help but must make sure that it is locally driven too and not just us imprinting our own ideas on them. It would be like re-creating the trauma of colonization all over again. 

Coming back to the North, there is something special about small places. Maybe it is because of our common struggles that we bond more closely as a community. Our community literally rallied and made the government create a medical school here. We have passion and drive, the kind of people who stay after work and volunteer to keep programs alive. This is a place where we have casual chit chat with strangers and put hearts in our windows to cheer people up for covid. We live in raw beauty- daily seeing the view of the mountains and being a 2-minute walk from the forest. This is a place where people raise each other up and no matter what external factors, a community is made up of people at its core. We took winter and transformed it into winter sports. We encourage local restaurants and local initiatives. We might not have all the things that other places have, but we also don’t have traffic and we have lots of space and greenery that improves our quality of life. There is more room for innovation in these scenarios. 

one of my paintings:
butterfly hands (acrylic)

One year ago, on April 4/20, I wrote about a very similar topic, about my love for home, the pain of thoughts of leaving but staying to give back to those who invested in me. I wrote about stirrings of change. For quite some time now, I have felt more and more like the angel whose wings no longer fit- this “home” has no space left for my wings. The feeling of being trapped has pervaded my subconscious and has finally just surfaced so much it can’t be ignored. Leaving familiarity is hard. We are wired as humans to recognize patterns, and after so much change in my life, it feels like I would be giving up the one thing that I do know. It is scary to leave the familiar for the unknown, but it is also necessary. I can choose a place big enough for my wings. I don’t like broken promises, to me a promise is a "pinky swear" situation in which you gave your word. I felt like I had always made a promise to serve the people who helped me to get to where I am and I couldn't betray them by leaving. My friend recently told me something beautiful- you are taking all the gifts they gave and spreading them to the world, it isn't a betrayal. Thinking back, I had a loved one say something that stands out powerfully for me today: if I need something to grow and heal and people don’t support me, no matter who they are, then just do it anyways because you don’t need them. It taught me a deep lesson that our relationships should never stunt each other from flying, expanding, growing, leaping. We should allow each other to flourish.

I’m thankful for all that this place gave me growing up. Certainly, living in a French-speaking area Quebec where I was born, would not have given me the life I have today. I’m excited to meet new sangat, to expand myself in every part of my health and being, to give myself everything I’ve been deprived of, that my soul is starving for. The simple truth is my heart belongs elsewhere now and the cost of keeping a promise should not be suffering. Now I understand the need to unapologetically do what you need to do for the sake of your heart and soul. I am excited to meet new people with common goals and actions, who will work together to achieve amazing things for the world. I'm excited to do work with organizations, maybe even something like Khalsa Aid. At the same time, I managed to find a way I can continue to serve the North and keep the important ties. I'm really interested in God's plans for the next stages of life. All I can do is take my step forward to making things real and see what happens.  

Reference for photo: 

https://mandyhale.com/2018/10/11/turn-toward-the-sun/